Semantic Web Search for e-Government: The Case Study of Intrastat

Abstract

The field of Statistics is a conceptually rich domain where information is complex, huge in volume, and highly valuable and critical for Governmental institutes. The daily production of statistical information increases exponent-tially worldwide, making the processing of all this information a very difficult and time-consuming task. Therefore, efficient search, filtering and browsing techniques are needed to access and process statistical data an effective way. We present semantically enhanced search approach to enhance e-Government searching services. We evaluate our proposals on the case of Intrastat, that is the method of collecting information and producing statistics on the export and import of goods between Member States of the European Union (EU), providing added-value web search services. We employ Semantic Web technologies to create an intelligent search engine based on modeling the systems' electronic catalogue using the OWL ontology language, combined with AJAX techniques for usability richness and responsiveness. We present a search tool based on these technologies, that consists of a) our novel ontology for the EU Combined Nomenclature codes serving as a knowledge base, b) a semantically enhanced search and recommendation module that improves the quality of the results and c) a ”Search as you type” visualization and navigation module to provide a usable interface to be used in navigation and search.